


Made For Death

by orphan_account



Category: Black Parade AU, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade - My Chemical Romance (Song)
Genre: Black Parade AU - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-02-27 01:49:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18729253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Gerard had always known he would've gone to Hell when he died. He didn't really believe in God, but he did believe in an afterlife. In Hell.He never thought Hell would make him clean, would make him into someone who deserved the family he had. Of course, he'd also never thought it would be quite like this...





	1. To The End...

September 10th.

A birthday. An important one.

The thought was at the forefront of his mind, for some reason. His brother's birthday. Mikey had never made a big deal out of his birthday, so every year he and Gerard would spend all day at the comic book shop - ever since Mikey was six and Gerard ten -, and all night making themselves sick from the store-bought chocolate cake they'd buy before they went home.

It was the only time they'd pass a certain house every year - it was old, by far the oldest architecture in their little town, creepy, with a gothic feeling to it...always with a lovely blonde lady sitting on the porch, with two little twin girls with jet black hair playing in the yard. She always told Mikey happy birthday (though neither of the brothers remembered telling her it was Mikey's birthday), and it was Gerard's least favorite house, easily.

He'd been sixteen when he was told that the house wasn't there. It was supposed to be a weed-infested plot of land that no one bought. But, no matter what he ever tried, Gerard only ever saw the house.

That house, it's occupants, every walk past it carrying three cakes each; those were the memories in his head, blocking out any other thoughts.

When Gerard opened his eyes, it took a moment to register.

He was standing in front of that house, 

Only then did the silence hit him, while staring at that house he so loathed - all he heard was ringing, the ringing only there when nothing else made a sound, ringing, ringing, ringing, hitting him abruptly, knocking his back, clutching his ears, ringing, ringing, ringing...

He screamed.

It receded. For now, he thought with a resignation he didn't feel he should have.

With a shaky breath, he straightened up, staring at the house. He noted the muteness of his surroundings - a dark gray sky with not a star in sight, a well-worn gravel pathway leading to the house, and - nothing. Nothing surrounded him except the sky, and tall stalks of light gray grass swaying due to a wind he couldn't feel. 

Looking back up at the house, it suddenly seemed older, more sinister, more beyond his comprehension. In the dim light it felt more like it belonged in ancient times, a mix of Roman style and gothic 1600's France. Something was pulling Gerard to that house; but he didn't want to go. He didn't want to go anywhere near the creaking shutters, the looming front door, the blacked-out windows staring him down. That house wasn't right. There was something very, very wrong with it. 

Besides, the blonde and her twins weren't there.

Even as he tried to walk away, though, Gerard's feet began to move on their own volition, bringing him forward, scraping loudly against the rough gravel, his heart pounding in his chest, begging him to stop moving and leave, backward, backward, backward, please...

His eyes darted in panic, but he was still going forward - he couldn't stop. Something told him he wasn't ready to go yet, that once he went into that house everything would change; that something tried to tug him back.

But what was pulling him was trying harder now, counteracting the weak tug with curiosity, the what-if, the need to know why that old house scared him so much, that something new wasn't bad, that he needed to go to that house. 

He'd just let his curiosity win him over when the pulling stopped - he stood unmoving in front of the door. It innocently stared back at him, as if sweetly saying 'what's to fear?'. There was no light coming from the inside, but that spiked Gerard's curiosity more than concern.

He'd barely opened the door before it burst open, wisps of shadowy tendrils snapping at him.

He didn't fall.

He didn't panic.

He didn't resist.

Even as they encased him, gently closing his eyes, he didn't struggle. It felt right. Final. Calming. Inevitable. Like he should've let them do this long ago.

~

He didn't fall asleep, not really, just patiently waited until the dark tendrils released him from their hold, a strange trust they wouldn't hurt him he couldn't help keeping him still.

They did after what felt like an hour - according to Gerard's internal clock, at least, which he apparently had now. He'd never really had much of a sense of time before. Now it was hypersensitive. It was July 23rd, at 6:18 a.m..

That was the least of this concerns as he realized that involuntary trust was ill-given.

This time, he opened his eyes to a...a wasteland?

Around him were what looked to be fallen metal beams, some literally broken in half and others half melted - some still seemed to be burning, molten steel bubbling and slowly devouring a pile.

There was dirt and debris around his feet; sometimes it was packed down like a trail, and other times untouched like the ground couldn't decide what to do. And, oh God, the smell, like...like...burnt flesh, smoke, and salt, all mixed together and making him flinch. There was still no sound, but the ringing wasn't as loud as it had been when he'd first been at the house.

It was only when he looked up that seemed to cement his thoughts of a wasteland. It was already raining ash like snow.

In the distance, he could see a city. Or maybe that was why it was so disconcerting; he could see parts of fa city. Dark spires reached up to touch the sky and fell short as their wood-and-metal insides struggled to keep together and upright; bleak gray towers meant to greet divinity crumbled as though that divinity came down with lightning-hot wrath; the sky sat cloudless with all it's stars stolen; and all with a full moon unnaturally large illuminating the damned and fallen city. Ruins closer to him all had bricks strewn everywhere, chipped paint revealing more more than the scales of gray Gerard was beginning to realize was all he could see. 

Some areas had no debris. Splayed in a circle around it, though, were more beams, chunks of plaster and concrete randomly weaving between, splintered wood with flecking paint mixed in. 

Bombs.

Gerard was right - it was a war zone. An old one, it seemed, but still a place of death. Maybe the misery seeping into the ground was what kept it all in shades of gray. It stole the color away from the city of devastation, a place where no color seemed to belong. The falling ash was what kept the ground from realizing that the fighting was over, that the color could go back to where it belonged. 

There were either no words, or no words in his vocabulary. No matter what he was trying to say it seemed he couldn't find a way to say it, so Gerard found himself contributing to the silence more than he realistically would've liked to. What could he say? And who would he be saying it to? 

So far, he'd seen only remnants of a soaring city. He'd seen no life, animal or otherwise. Something told him that maybe he didn't want to. 

He wasn't panicking. That was maybe what frightened him the most - why wasn't he panicking? Shouldn't he be trying to get home? To Mikey? To stop listening to the voice inside his head that made him go into that dreary house in the first place? Wondering how the Hell he even ended up at that house in the first place?

He knew, somehow, that he wasn't going home. The thought didn't fill him with dread and panic, as maybe it should've. He wasn't going home - that much was assured the moment he stepped onto that porch. And the voice inside his head - it seemed more to be guiding him. Like he knew this all subconsciously already.

Instead of freaking out, he found himself picking through the ruin, to get to a destination he needed know yet. What else was there to do? He knew it wasn't food or water he needed to find - in fact, he...he felt clear-headed. His hands weren't shaking. His vision wasn't blurry. He didn't feel the need for a drink or a cigarette or even cocaine or prescription pills. He felt...clean. 

What the Hell?

His thoughts provided little use as he stumbled and tripped through debris, not really knowing where to go. At some point he'd decided he had to goals in mind: to find someone else, something else, and to get to where the tallest spire he could see was. It seemed some distance away, but it was as good a starting point as any, he supposed.  
Gerard had never been very athletic, and it was biting him in the ass. Usually, he didn't have any need to run any obstacle courses, but now he saw that he should've, if only in preparation of...whatever this place was. It was colorless wasteland raining ash with little to no other life around so...Should he just call it Hell? Maybe it was Hell.

But that would mean he was dead. He couldn't be dead. This had to be a bad trip or something, right? But why would a bad trip on whatever make him see that house again? He only ever saw that house one day of the year and it was on his mind for about ten minutes each year. And it also didn't explain why he was seeing this place, so vividly, so real...

Quickly, he put his hand to his neck, feeling for a pulse - he had one. He breathed a sigh of relief. Of course he had one. Because he was alive...right? He had to be. He had to be...He wouldn't do that to Mikey.

Maybe what he should be wondering is, if he was oh-so-sure he was alive, why he was so defensive about it. Why even the idea of being dead make him think so much. If he was alive, then he sure as Hell had never heard of this place. And it was too real to be a bad trip, and besides, he had none of his cravings that were there when he was having a trip anyway.

He refused to think about being dead, though maybe that was because that little voice inside his head that had guided him so far told him he was right. No, he was going to focus on getting to that spire and finding someone to explain this entire situation to him and then break it to him that he just had a psychotic break and didn't remember getting here, and he was really just insane all along and none of it was real. 

Far fetched hopes from the guy who had just been encased in shadows by the front door of a house that doesn't actually exist.

 

-

He'd been wandering for about three hours, losing himself in the routine of moving debris out of his path and trying to climb over random walls that used to belong to an actual neighborhood, when he heard footsteps around him.

Despite how much he was craving human interaction and just the notion of human life, that little voice told him that he needed to keep looking forward; looking backward would do him no good.

The footsteps continued, soft and nearly silent, even with all the rubble in the way, but whoever they belonged to never tried to catch up to Gerard or even speak to him. He wondered why, and then he realized that a phantom following behind him wouldn't even be the weirdest thing that had happened in the last 24 hours. 

Eventually, though, they stopped entirely. Gerard was going to keep continuing on, when he heard a light laughter, high-pitched and...sounding kind of insane, actually.  
That was when he turned, despite his better judgement that seemed to have gone out the door the moment he opened that door, and immediately a jolt of fear made him stumble back, reaching out for something to catch him and finding only the jagged end of a piece of steel, piercing through part of his palm. 

The woman - no, no, it was more like a girl, he noted dully, clutching his palm and belatedly realizing that his hand should be immobile, not in minor pain - laughed again, louder this time, a shrill cackle that made Gerard instinctively want to run.

"Who the Hell are you?" He asked instead, putting all the confidence he could muster into it, standing up straighter and hiding his injured palm behind his back. It hurt, yeah, but none of the striking pain he should've felt. Not even the smell of burning skin. 

The girl, with a strip of black running across her face and her eyes, which already had pure black irises, grinned at Gerard with sharp teeth, almost like a vampires. "Me? Well, I'm your welcoming committee."

That did nothing to put Gerard at ease. In fact, it probably made his nerves worse. "I don't need a welcoming committee."

"Yes, you do," she said rather forcefully, still with that wicked grin of hers. Her face didn't betray any of her emotions, but Gerard thought he might've seen a sliver of surprise. "Or else you're going to have an abnormally strange afterlife."

Gerard didn't say anything in response, just stared at her. He wasn't particularly into girls, and sure she was pretty enough he supposed, with sharp cheekbones and full lips and jet black hair to her shoulders, but there was something...radiating off her that told him she was dangerous. Not to be messed with. If the cackle and grin hadn't tipped him off.

She was the one to break the staring, dragging her feet as she slowly circled around him. The jolt of adrenaline was back, rushing fear through his brain, but he didn't move, not even to look at her. Eventually, she was the one to speak. "Oh, you're something special, Gerard Way. I'm Fear. You'll meet my sister soon enough."

Gerard refused to turn - but in his head, at least, he was piecing a little bit together. The jolt of adrenaline he got by looking at her, the sharp teeth, the fear - that was just it. She was fear. Quite literally., she embodied fear. And while this should've set many alarms off in Gerard's head, it didn't; it made perfect sense. Besides, it wasn't even the strangest thing to have happened was it? Seeing a girl made for fear?

She 'tsked' him, still circling, though this time when she came back into his line of sight next to her, padding silent, was a large wolf - its coat was completely black, blurry around the edges, almost like it was made of the same substance as the shadows that had brought him here. The wolf didn't even growl at him - only stared with curious, predatory eyes as Fear scratched at it's chin leisurely. "Hm, maybe you aren't as bad as I thought you'd be. Timid, though. I do hope that rights itself. You have the right idea, prodigy. The spire is your best bet."

And before she'd even finished her last word, she left the edges of Gerard's vision - and the scraping sound of her dragging her feet across the dirt and smaller rubble disappeared; instantaneously, the ringing of silence returned. 

Gerard had learned by now that because of the utter soundlessness of the wasteland he was in, when the ringing came back it came back full force - it would knock you too the ground, make you curl up and clutch your ears begging for it to stop like it was a sonic bomb instead of silence, but if you screamed it receded. If you yelled, shouted, cursed loud enough, it receded.

So he screamed, and it didn't even occur to him the oddity of a situation he was in. He almost laughed at that. In a bizarre world with no color and no sound other than the epitome of Fear he'd met seconds ago with a phantomish wolf, he randomly screamed, and not even out of frustration or hopelessness.

He carried on walking. There was nothing else but walking to do, and Fear had given him even more motivation to get to that spire.


	2. And We're All Dead Now...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gerard wasn't quite sure what he expected. But it wasn't this.

Made For Death

Chapter Two

The dystopian he was in, Gerard found, didn't mess with his sense of time in the slightest. In fact, it was heightened, to the point where, if he concentrated, he could practically hear the ticking of the clock as the seconds passed.

He hadn't seen a clock since he'd gotten here, and he'd been wandering for approximately six days, fifteen hours, and sixteen minutes. He hadn't seen another soul beside Fear since, either, as anti-climatic as it was. He'd even began questioning if there was anyone else here. Was it his own personal Hell?

He'd tried to, but he couldn't feel his own pulse. He still slept, but never felt he need to get food or water. Or go to the bathroom. From the multitude of small cuts and bruises he'd gotten from wandering for the last week, he'd found he still bled and bruised.

Gerard's blood was flowing, but his heart was stoppe indefinitely...He wanted to ask why, but then again the only person he'd met kept around a wolf twice the size of him and seriously had a goth Harley Quinn persona going on. Yeah, didn't really feel like his best option.

The ringing still got to him sometimes, but screaming channeled it out longer and longer the more he did it. Gerard was assuming his body was gaining an immunity to the wretched sound the more he dealt with it, and eventually it was just going to go away forever. He was hoping.

It really hurt his ears. 

He preferred to walk in silence. When he he'd first gotten here, the spire he was reaching for hadn't seemed so far away. Now, though, it was at least a hundred or so miles out, making him wonder if that spire really was as large as it would have to be for Gerard to assume it was close that far away via the rules of perspective, or if it was the landscape playing tricks on him, as he had no doubt it could. Having been swallowed by shadows and scared by a giant wolf appearing by a girl named Fear kind of sort of gave him that impression.

The walk calmed his mind at least, and he was having to dig through less and less rumble. Which was great, because he was so sick and tired of getting cuts and bruises from accidentally leaning or falling on sharp metal or having to use his non-existent muscles to move debris out of the way. It was hellish, all pun intended if he really was in Hell.

The silence, even without the ringing, unnerved him. He couldn't figure out any reason as to why other than that he was used to noise; either Mikey's stereo playing in his room, occasionally sharing earbuds with his brother, the uiet humming his mom did when they were in the kitchen, the beep of the coffee maker, the constant thrum of chatter when he was in the office, the shouting on the rare occasions that he was coerced to go to a party, the scratching of pencil on paper.

He learned the other reason why the silence unnerved him when he saw he wasn't alone.

Well, saw wasn't the right word. It was more like he was forced to consider it, because one moment he was walking around deri with ash falling in his hair and eyes again, and the next he was on the ground.

Gerard's eyes darted around, his heart racing, refusing to look at the thing above him, holding him to the ground with a piece of shrapnel digging painfully in next to his spine.

He preferred Fear, he thought dully ,the only sensible thought he had in a complete moment of panic, breaking into a cold sweat.

The thing above him looked a lot like a zombie California girl. He couldn't see the colors, but he could guess - limp, tangled and matted light hair stuck via sweat to a pale, sunken face, with one milk white eye and one pitch black eye, a steady stream of saliva making it's way down to Gerard's face. It's frame was so slight, so bony that Gerard was sure he could see at least one bridle, brown rib bone sticking out of its side, hip bones jutting out violently and tearing the skin like a serrated knife. It had clothes on - had it been human? -, so torn and dirty and shredded that they barely did anything.

And Gerard couldn't move. It was like his limbs just wouldn't move. He couldn't stop staring, taking in all the irrelevant details while his mind tried to figure out what was going on and was this thing going to eat him and what was this thing and why did it attack him and this was an attack, right? His knees felt locked in place and he couldn't move his torso, because this thing was on it, toe nails digging into Gerard's rib sas disgusting as that sounded; the creature hadn't pinned Gerard's arms, but one was uncomfortably pinned behind his back when he had tried to catch himself in his fall and the other felt more like a noddle thn an actual, connected to his brain, limb. 

A drop of saliva fell onto Gerard's clothes, burning like acid would. Gerard suddenly did not want that to fall onto his skin, and still, still he could not move. He was shaking, wide-eyed, staring, but he couldn't move. He was hyperventilating - wait, he was still breathing? He didn't even notice,

 

The thing, the creature, whatever it as, cocked it's head curiously, and almost recoiled as the sudden sound of Gerard's breathing felt like it slapped him in the face. Fuck, could he die if he was already dead? What was this thing? He needed to move to move to get away to stop shaking to move -

"Hey! Leave him alone!"

There was a hand shoving away the creature - who made a sound somewhere back in it's throat that reminded Gerard of those old WWII documentaries he was forced to watch of the gas chambers - scrambled off of him in a split second. That same hand was now outstretched to him. 

It embarrassing second longer to realize he was supposed to take said hand, and when he did, he nearly doubled over.

Screw nearly getting mauled by an acid-spitting Hell creature. The boy in front of him certainly did not look like he belonged, well, dead.

"Thanks," Gerard managed to mumble out, dusting off his clothes despite knowing it was a lost cause. He'd been wearing the same clothes since he'd gotten here. (For a normal person, it would've been disgusting, but Gerard and his brother had a bad habit of horrible personal hygiene.) "Who are you?"

The stranger - a boy, with half his head shaved and the other half in a swoop on his cheek, with the prettiest eyes Gerard had ever seen (even in the black-gray-white scale he was getting accustomed too) -, smiled at him, light glinting off his lip ring. "Frank Iero, your knight-in-shining armor. You are?"

Gerard half-attempted to get himself together before giving a nod. For some reason. Great, now he was embarrassing himself too. "Gerard Way, your damsel in distress, apparently."

Frank kept smiling at him, laughing slightly as Gerard averted his eyes because, okay, it had been an entire week since he'd last seen another peson, let alone someone with a smile as pretty as that, and even before that, it wasn't like Fear was a great conversationalist and Gerard had liked talking to his paintings for comfort; he was allowed some slack for being awkward. "Yeah, I suppose so. Stay away from them; their bite makes you one of them and trust me, no one likes that."

"How, exactly, can I avoid them?" Gerard asked, scrunching up his face in distaste. That creature had been absolutely horrendous - Gerard hadn't even been able to tell if it had originally been a male or a female because of the frame, and the hair had been too matted and dirty and knotted to tell whether it was long or short. 

Looking back, when it wasn't about to bite him like a t-rex with acid spit, Gerard could've swore it had a medal stuck on its shirt, dingy and dented but a medal. But that had to be a hallucination.

"-ou can't, not really," Frank snapped in his face, bringing Gerard back to the desolate world in front of him rather than the desolate world in his head. The short boy - because Frank was very, very short now that Gerard thought about it. Certainly abot five-foot something, and not anything more than 5'7" - sighed and shook his head. "They don't like sound, though, I've found."

"What," Gerard started, wiping the sweat off his brow and then raising them in mock amusement. His heartbeat was calming down, and he found it helped to act confident. "Do I just scream at it and it'll go away? That seems a little...unlikely."

Frank shrugged. "I have no idea how it works. I just know that if I scream they go away. Honestly, I don't want to know what magical bullshit it is."

Oh, lovely. Gerard had been hoping it would be like those bad YA novels he always ended up reading when he had artist's block and didn't want to get wasted. You know, the one where the main character gets introduced to the main supporting characters and the support characters explains everything down to a science? He was really hoping for that.

Maybe it would, but later, because maybe he wasn't a main character.

"You're not very helpful," Gerard noted, shaking his head. They were both standing around like two awkward prepubescent girls in gym. Gerard took it upon himself to start walking again, in the direction of that towering spire.

Frank made no move to leave, or any gesture to tell Gerard he was going the wrong way and should head in a different direction, so Gerard took that as he would have a companion for a little while until Frank got bored of him and left. Oh, if only he knew.

They didn't talk for a long while. Gerard was still pretty shaken up, even if he thought he was doing a rather good job of not outwardly showing it. Frank didn't even look disheveled, or disturbed, despite Gerard not being able to get the creature out of his head. 

Gerard didn't want to talk, to be perfectly honest. He was okay with companionable silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhhh sorry it's a little short but??? i needed to get it done and, yeah, am lowkey horrible at this.
> 
> But still, comments are always appreciated!

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts my dude? Always appreciated. I need them like air.


End file.
